


these purple lines

by Ashesandmint



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: And love, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, a lot of it, attempts at time-meddling and resurrection, my attempt at a fix-it (for both canon and my sanity), there will be smut, time-travel, yelena is Not Nice
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-08
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-08-12 04:36:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20161009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashesandmint/pseuds/Ashesandmint
Summary: Yelena blips back with half of the universe but Natasha, Natasha’s gone.Post-Endgame.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Fellow n/y shippers! I’m quite new to this fandom but am Very In My Feelings rn. The following fic won’t include too many chapters, just enough to unfold its core purpose. Natasha’s death in eg rattled me so hard i still haven’t recovered so we’ll see what we can do about that!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> writing inspired by the amazing @breathedout yelena/natasha fics!!

It’s tremors that wake her up and _Natalia, _blunt cuts to her chest and it’s a word, nuzzles itself in her windpipe and stays.

You see, she thought she was coming to terms with it, the long awaited dream; outshining, outliving Natalia until outliving Natalia paced in closer and passed and now it tastes like tar and gasoline in her lungs.

It tastes like shards of glass dipped in lead when it shouldn’t, really. Winning should be fun. 

_These should have been satisfaction. _Like the buzzing taste after the platform of her combat boot crashes clear and sure into an istrebitel’s face. This should have put her to _rest. _It crumbles; It cracks so, zircon and pyrite.  Because now there’s no Natalia. Amerikanskaya, bane of her existence, _Natalia_. And Yelena doesn’t cry, she convulses and shakes and breaks and doesn’t sleep for ten whole days. Until sanity is running low and can’t be counted, until her mind materializes Natasha infront of her, red hair and bright teeth and genuine-looking skin she can almost feel. And her mind begs her to rest but she doesn’t until Natalia, half-figment half-hallucination, takes her lips between her lips and kisses her to sleep.

“You won’t live long like this, little one.” Her mind dressed as Natasha tells her. And in her mind, she’s not sure of things anymore. Untethered and unbalanced and  _this isn’t how it’s supposed to be._

“I should have killed you myself. Then you wouldn’t haunt me like a disgraceful failure.”

“Lena, you could not have killed me.”

“You know I could.”

The figment smiles and tilts her head and breathes, and a laugh that’s a little too demanding. “Too bad you can’t anymore.”

“Piz ‘da.” Yelena spits out, to the air, to herself, to a dead Natasha planets away and rotting and decaying in solitude. Natasha always liked her solitude.

“I should have done it myself.” Because no one else had the right. And no one else deserved Natasha’s red blood.

No one had fought like her, _sought_ and pined after Natasha the way she had and now in lost potential she screams. She screams into her pillow and out her window down at still streets and in the palm of her hand, teeth biting down on flesh. There’s marks and streaks of blood on Yelena but Yelena doesn’t stop screaming. 

She screams raspy and broken and feral. Frightening symphony. And it’s hers—Natalia’s—it’s for her. A tribute composed by Yelena and Yelena alone.

_I’ve had enough of you in my head._

She has things to do and missions to complete but then there’s Natasha in the periphery of her vision and crippling, crippling her.

“You can’t live long like this, little one.”

“I can live however I want.” She spits back, always angry at her, angry and angry and broken. It blooms, colors her like a bag of blood spilt in water.

* * *

Sweat sticks her hair to her face and shecoughs, wheezes, doesn’t have time to catch her breath between screaming her throat raw. Her target’s apartment is a mess, with blood smeared where it shouldn’t be, unprofessional, _weak._

It’s been like this forever, it feels,  or _is_. And Yelena, notes in the back of her mind. That she’s on the verge of something terrible. 

“You’re killing me, Natalia.”

Natasha is perched on the desk, legs splayed over the tall-backed chair and uninterested, looks at Yelena. She’s been procured so often now it’s gotten on her nerves, she’s gotten impatient. But Yelena is unraveling. She needs tender.

She wants Natasha’s heart beating against hers. 

She rationalizes, that it’s the bone-deep desire to fight, hand to hand and so close. The need to put her in her place one more time. 

So it’s acceptable, if she’d dream of Natasha stroking her hair and whispering in her ear and hands, hands on her neck. And lips on her heart.

Yelena feels fatigue wash through her bones, sees it evident in the circles beneath her eyes and hears it, doubled over on the floor with her cheek on ceramic tiles and her dry tears wetting both.

_Yes, Natasha, you have beat me._

Even dead.

But it’s not a surrender that leaves Yelena’s lips because that’s not what she was taught, that’s not what ballerinas and steel-trained assassins do. It’s not surrender because if it was, it means she lost. It wasn’t surrender because Natalia doesn’t get to slip away from her that easy. Not even to fate. And Yelena, like any respectable Red Room graduate, didn’t believe in fate. She believed in Mother Russia. And Natasha despite her traitorous nonsense belonged to Mother Russia.

It wasn’t a matter of possibility. It was a necessity. What Yelena had to do.

* * *

The green giant would be impossible to sneak up on and fight; so she goes for the Ant-Man first. When his suit is far away and her knife is in her hand and “Natasha, the Black Widow, you’ll bring her back.” A demand, not a request.


	2. Chapter 2

“Who are you?”

It’s the first thing Yelena hears him say. Voice squeaky-tough. A poor attempt.

“It doesn’t matter.” _No_, secrecy of identity was not needed. She touches the logo on her belt she had snatched off of Natasha’s belt, a relic, a beautiful little spider: “I’m the black widow.” She flicks the blade in his general direction, enjoying the flow of it. Black steel shining. The blade said not to call out for help, not to even think about it.

On her way there she had replayed the possible scenarios and breathed, breathed in her stone conviction and then waved her mind away when it asked her: _all this for Natalia? _

A thing is not for someone who receives, it’s for who takes the action. And she was stone-hard conviction. Alianovna’s blood was hers.

Yelena looks at Scott and kicks him in his right ankle, he falls face first onto the floor. She wasn’t bothering with any over-the-top skill. He wasn’t too much of a fight, and this got her point across clearer_: I could take you without breaking a single sweat_.

Scott was propping himself up on his elbow. The pain shooting up his ankle was nagging and hot, not a fracture, but close enough.

“Argh.” He grunts and glances up at her, trying to look less vulnerable, but failing. He thought it a rather terrible end to his day.

“What you want me to do, if I don’t do it, what then?” He’s pulled himself enough that he’s on knees in front of her. “What are you going to do, kill me?” Scott, Scott wasn’t trembling yet. But he knew limitations, an older version of him wouldn’t have said that, but now his shortcomings did not include bravery. After all he’s been through and done. Cowardice wasn’t an option. Dying for a cause was defining, and _cool._ Letting bad guys get their way wasn’t an option either.

“Killing you is the least damage I will do.”

She pulls at his hair and brings his face down onto the floor with a _crack _sound and a soft gush of blood and a dizziness knocks on his door. He’s breathing through it when she pulls a picture out of her pocket. Her catsuit jet black against the near darkness of the room, the near pitch-black. But he could see the face smiling back at him in the picture clearly enough. And of course; Killing him seemed like the least horrific answer now.

“I’m a Russian agent, the best kind, Mr. Lang. And when I tell you there is nowhere you can hide her from me, you believe me.”

Scott closes his eyes. The top of his head burning with—, anger, and fright. Dripping with it.

“If you hurt my daughter—“

“Threaten me all you want, it won’t be of much use if she dies,” Yelena is all stitches beneath skin, as if what’d been going down for the past month or two hadn’t happened. She’s _clearly _at the top of her game. Clearly in control. _Clearly_—

Scott raises his eyes from the floor, the disgust he feels trampled by the slick tar of defeat. Spreading over his tongue and making him want to retch.

“What d’you want me to do? Erase everything we’ve done, meddle in something that could destroy everything?”

Yelena wasn’t going to be intimidated by him. The key word being ‘could’. It _could _ruin everything. But not necessarily. Not surely.

“I’m not interested in changing the outcome.” Yelena is high chin and unwavering gaze and mind set for once. Set on the red hair of the Amerikanskaya like it was set on the portrait of her, once before the Amerikanskaya herself had wavered and treaded over the boarder lines into American arms, into American warmth. When Mother Russia’s cold was more _deserving_. When Mother Russia had _made her_.

Scott, Scott holds up. Critical, disbelieving. “Why would you go through all this then?”

She’s had enough. “You don’t seem to understand the situation.” Yelena holds a small pill from her belt pocket. She throws it two meters across the room and the moment it hits the floor Scott feels his ears ring.

It blows through the floorboards and the bricks of the wall and the chair situated near it. And before he regained his sense of place Yelena grabbed his head back and rammed something metal and small through his eardrum. Making him scream. She lodged it in as far as she could while making sure he wouldn’t be able to manually get it out. He couldn’t _breathe_.

“See that there? I just shoved one into your skull. And I’ll shove one into Cassie’s skull, as well. Now, Scott, when did Natasha die?” She lets go of his hair and for a tip of a second Scott wants to cry.

He slows down, breath and thought and flutter of his heart. A soft taste of blood sneaking its way into his mouth. Not a shut down or a retreat. A sort of retreat. Into a white room in his mind he’d go to when the fifth-grade bully would approach. When the fifth-grade bully would hit and shout and scream. No, not a retreat, a dip of his toe into a comfort pool and then he breathes, looks at her determination and tries not to think too much about what she really wants. 

She’d heard the official reports. And the unofficial ones. Off planet deaths and that somewhere alone and dark, Natasha had probably turned to bones. On some nameless star system, on the hands of some _man. _Itboils and grinds Yelena in ways she can and can’t comprehend.

And something about _time_. The notion laughable if half the world hadn’t turned to dust then came back again, now nothing is off the table. The graphic children’s novels she’d see the other kids run around with suddenly manifested into the world, in flesh. _Smekhotvornyy_. _Shutka._

* * *

He tells her everything. His volume in disarray. Too low out of pain, then too loud for hearing loss. Natasha has been dead for nine years, he says, on the planet of Vormir. Her life in exchange for a stone. And Yelena wishes she was alone in that moment. Instead she grabs the desk-lamp to her right and shatters it, the glass sparkling on the floor like spilled liquid. He flinches hard.

He thought about running away, tricking her and using his suit to disappear. But that was unwise with a bomb in his head and Russian Agents on the whereabouts of his girl. The blue-red glaring anxiety grabbed ahold of him. Neck and throat, while he gave her her own suit and put on his. The equipment and the spaceship and everything, _all of it_, stored in Hank Pym’s lab, the replicants, the quantum realm machine Hank had expanded; _we couldn’t let this kind of tech die. _And it was dangerous, most definitely dangerous. _Don’t worry Scott, no one will bypass my security._

It turns out, no one except for Scott.

The miniaturized ship was in his hands. He touches it with his thumb lightly, back and forth.

“Proceed.” She’s impatient to get there. Hand on the switches of her suit and eyes trained above at something unseen. 

* * *

They go back first, to 2014. And then, out of sight and under radar, board their ship headed towards the planet in Helgentar. Yelena knows how to hide her doubts in front of strangers, she isn’t exposed nerve endings or rattled eyes, she’s none of those outside of the outer layer of her skin. There’s a toilet in the ship, something too small to be comfortable. And Yelena does not throw up in the sink, she _does not. _

They get there just before a fight, Natasha sitting on a boulder hands under her chin and thoughts planets away and here and present. Yelena looks and everything is purple. Yelena looks and everything is red, hair braided to the side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh man im sorry scott but Yelena's gotta do what she's gotta do ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


End file.
